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January 2015

31 January 2015

[OK people, I'm disappointed in you. Here I posted a piece on what's happening in Greece that will have significant fallout on all of us in America, and no one gave a big rat's ass. Are you guys pulling in your horns and want RR to revert to a local issues mudball fight? Ain't gonna happen. You've shown the moxie and the intellectual bandwidth to handle geo-strategic issues in the past. Don't quit now. I want to see some broadband capacity out of this bunch to handle stuff that really matters. There are other blogs that do wine shop opening scooplets and mudball slinging at opposite ideologies in these foothills, let's keep this forum a bit above that fray. Capice?]

Politics – Purposed pandering intended to sway a wider audience under the guise of communicating with another party.

The local Wrong-way Corrigan collectivists seem to have trouble untying their bundled undies. With one side of their mouth they are continually describing our community as being “purple”, and with the other side complaining that recently arrived progressives are being rejected. From this morning’s Union piece by Ms Cheryl Cook (former member of the paper’s editorial board who resigned in a huff), it is clear that Democrat party leader Jim Firth has an equally sour soulmate. Both are singing the ‘Too Many Conservatives Blues’. (Jim Firth’s sad tale was covered here.)

Let me see if I can shed a little light into their fog bank –

First, just because someone thinks your ideas are cockamamie, and your ideology is terminally broken does not mean that you are being muzzled, or not welcome to proselytize collectivism in these foothills. Don’t worry, the Right is strong enough to take you on in the battle of wits that both sides wage for the benefit of the undecided and/or undeclared voters. But that doesn’t mean that we automatically become hugging buddies and start sending each other Christmas cards (do progressives still do that?).

As an example, one of the Left’s big ideas is to be a ‘welcoming and caring community’ for the indigent who range from locals temporarily on hard times to the ‘y’all come!’ bums from all over the northern parts of California and Nevada. And then we wonder why we have the drug and MJ nuisance and crime problems in our public spaces and neighborhoods. One only needs to look at the published ‘curricula vitae’ of the culturally deprived that adorn our police blotter, and the (now hidden inside) stories of murder and mayhem in the Union. We don’t need to import more of the kind of problems we are already having trouble solving with our own, no matter how politically correct, inclusive, and heartwarming it feels.

Second, continuing to sing the ‘Now We’re All Purple’ song is misleading. The reality of Nevada County’s ideological distribution is an ongoing disappointment to our local liberals. Purple implies a mixed amalgam, a population of people whose belief systems, in the large, are in that great, undefined muddle-of-the-road. And as Mr Firth and Ms Cook have discovered (while some progressive bloggers remain forever confused), that ain’t necessarily nor even actually so. The community is truly polarized, with a big hump of people on the left, and a slightly bigger hump of people on the right of the ideological spectrum. The middle lowland remains confused and looks to both sides beseeching ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’

Get over it. You guys told us that you are here to “fundamentally transform America”. And we believe that America is nowhere close to needing any kind of fundamental transformation whatsoever. But you and yours have already doubled down, especially here in California, and shown all what kind of devastation your public policies can wreak on what arguably was the world’s best rendition of the Garden of Eden. We on the right like the steady evolutionary pace of social, economical, and technological change that has been with us since 1865, the kind of change that thrives with personal freedoms, limited government, and open markets.

And last (for now), we don’t trust you. You guys on the left are sneaky. You never spell out what you really believe, what your objectives are for social values, governance, economic structures, foreign policy, and world order. You present your big ideas through hearthrobbing anecdotes while hiding the real stuff in the seldom read and little known writings of Marx/Engels, Webb, Debs, Proudhon, Chomsky, …, and your operational field manuals are obscure documents like the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives brought to bear by a subrosa worldwide network of local ICLEIs promoting ever more regulatory shackles through the watchwords of ‘sustainability’ and ‘smart growth’ that resonate with the unlearned.

So yes, we will oppose your ideas wherever we find them. But do not confuse that with opposition to your ability to air them to whomever will listen to you. Just don’t be surprised if you see us in the same forum doing our best to show people the error of your ways - that's called freedom of speech guaranteed by that pesky First Amendment.

30 January 2015

Yesterday afternoon and evening I, along with various board members of the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation, joined with several hundred other Nevada County residents at the Grass Valley Veterans Center to hear nationally known economics commentator and urban studies pundit Joel Kotkin, along with an invited panel of economic development professionals, to learn about factors that will impact economic development in smaller rural counties. Board members Russ Steele, Fred Buhler, Barry Pruett, Gil Mathew, and I represented SESF which was a co-sponsor of the event.

This report will contain reflections on the occasion and economic development in NC from the above which will be appended here below as I receive them.

29 January 2015

[Nevada County Librarian Ms Laura Pappani sent me the following byline to inform RR readers of the current goings on with the library regarding its funding and renewal of Measure C. Our library is transforming itself to serve the community in the age of internet connectivity, providing citizens expanded opportunities to study, communicate, retrieve information, learn, ... . It deserves your support. gjr]

Laura Pappani

As one of my colleagues is fond of saying, “The bunheads are dead.” That old stereotype of a mousy, shushing librarian, peering over her glasses in prim disapproval? So last century. Today’s libraries are vibrant and vital community centers, providing a bridge to information and entertainment. In 2014, we received more than 350,000 visits as people walked across that bridge to enter a Nevada County Public Library and utilize our free materials, resources, and services. We are efficient, responsive, and constantly keeping our ear to the ground to anticipate our community’s needs.

Funding for the Nevada County Public Libraries comes from a variety of sources, but the biggest chunk – more than 65% - comes from 0.125% of each penny of sales tax collected in Nevada County, designated for the Library by voters in 1998 and renewed by Measure C in 2002. Every dollar that comes to the Library through Measure C is monitored by the Citizen’s Oversight Committee, a group of volunteers who meet several times a year to ensure accountability and public transparency. The Library is responsive to public input on programs and services and seeks to provide measurable outcomes. In addition to lending books, movies, and music, we provide literacy tutoring for adults, research assistance, a variety of programs for children and teens including a popular Summer Reading Program, classes on technology, research, and job search strategies, and programs and lectures on a variety of topics.

The Library is constantly striving to anticipate the needs of the people of Nevada County through publicly-informed strategic planning. We are responsive to citizen input and are partners in business development and job skills training, as much as for reading and enrichment. I hope you will come visit one of the Nevada County Public Libraries – the Madelyn Helling Library and the Doris Foley Library for Historical Research in Nevada City, the Grass Valley Library – Royce Branch (which celebrates its 100th birthday next year), the Truckee Library, the Penn Valley Station, or the Bear River Station – and see for yourself how we are contributing to a vibrant and dynamic Nevada County.

[Addendum - I have added a paragraph from the cover email she sent me. It amplifies the words above. gjr]

"... If the Measure C renewal is not passed by voters, we would either need approximately $2,000,000 from the County’s General Fund to continue to provide Library services at current levels, or would suffer cuts to library hours, services, and facilities that would be so severe that I get nightmares just thinking about it. Our County libraries are well-loved and well-used by people across socio-economic and political lines, so I’m hoping I will find widespread support from the community."

27 January 2015

Ms Heidi Hall is our community’s new progressive political wannabe. She is also a newly assigned columnist for The Union and a KVMR commentator. She is a well-spoken, handsome looking woman with plenty of education in fields that have ‘government job’ written all over them, and true to form that is her employment record (curriculum vitae here).

I have now read two of her columns, and frankly find them low grade ore. In today’s (27jan15) Union she writes a piece that contains absolutely nothing but a rearranged list of staid leftwing talking points wrapped around the occasion of Obama’s SOTU. Somewhat surprisingly, she found the speech an inspirational litany of just what the country needs, and would benefit from if only the obstructionist Republican Congress would come to its senses and abandon its “failing economic ideologies and work with the president to help the middle class.” Yes, the lady did wordsmith it to echo the president’s talking points.

Her socialist economics are fairly simple in their statement, and, of course, not sustainable in practice (today Greece, Spain, and France come to mind). Her “Economics 101 truism” is to somehow get money into the pockets of the middle class in one way or another, and then we’ll be off and running. Actually, being a progressive, her knowledge of how to do that is pretty skimpy, but it’s worthy to point out her approach.

“The question is how to get more money to people like you and me, and who makes that happen. Ideally, we earn it. We are paid the true value of our labor. Since this is no longer happening, we need government to act.”

Got that? In her world the ‘true value of labor’ is not something that is known to the worker or the employer when they make their agreement to work together. But not to worry, it is known to the government, which then needs “to act”, to enforce by the gun what it mandates from on high as the true value of labor. Seriously, from this and her other established talking points, we see the socialist world that Ms Hall has to offer. While more cleverly packaged, it is no better than what Gus Hall (no presumed relationship) prescribed for us fifty years ago.

With what she today promised for her future columns, there is little or nothing new that we can expect from her output in the coming editions of our local newspaper. Any one of our RR readers could easily draft such partisan pabula. As our new prominent voice of the Left, she should be capable of much more that we hope to see sooner than later. (Hint: As an example, contend the January 2015 CBO analysis of Obamacare that shows the socialist health care program will be nothing like advertized in reducing deficits, lowering costs, and providing health insurance to more people.)

[28jan15 update] Tonight we attended the NC Tea Party meeting where the program was an excellent presentation on Agenda21 by Ms Debbie Bacigalupi (announced here). She presented a comprehensive review of the UN’s plan for achieving a “sustainable” world through “smart growth” that would actually shrink the planet’s human population from its current almost 7 billion to about 1 billion. The means for this would be developed by the new global governance that will come into being through the co-operation of the UN member states.

RR has long covered Agenda21 to the jeers of some extremely ignorant local leftwingers who divide into two groups. The first denying the existence of the UN plan, and the second denying that any of it is being implemented here in America. Ms Bacigalupi's presentation on the published volumes, resolutions, conferences, congressional sessions (including a wonderful C-SPAN video of a much younger Pelosi proposing House acceptance of the Agenda21 resolution under the Bush1 presidency), documents, formations of worldwide ICLEIs (q.v.), on and on down to our local government resolutions adopting Agenda21 objectives.

She also quoted chapter and verse on how and why the Agenda21 worldwide initiative should and would be kept from the public view. The existence of grass roots leftwing useful idiots in vocal denial of all this demonstrates the success of this subterfuge. RR readers have been kept apprised of these developments in posts found in the Agenda21 category accessed from the right column.

Why I’m posting this little update here is that in attendance tonight was Ms Heidi Hall, sitting in the back busily taking notes on her pad. I was heartened by her attendance and eagerly look forward to her report on the proceedings and information presented on Agenda21. When/if she does post a column or radio commentary on this, we will again see how the leftwing interprets for us the global initiative that is a basis for the promised fundamental transformation of America.

Over the weekend Greece elected a communist party – working name Syriza – to head its next government. Syriza promised a bald-faced lie as a solution to the country’s longstanding and deepening economic crisis. The country is flat broke, produces little that the world wants or can easily get from others, is totally underwater in debt with its unemployment running rampant. This is fertile ground for super simplistic ‘solutions’ that have been fed loudly and often to its desperate and little-minded. And the further left the promising political party, the simpler is the proposed solution. In this case Syriza convinced enough Greeks that the return to economic health will be through simply abandoning austerity and refusing to meet its debt obligations.

After the dust settles from their victory celebrations (pictured), Syriza’s communist economic policies will be hard to hide. The country’s EU lenders have already promised not to forgive Greeks their loans (they bit on that once, and got taken twice). And there are only so many Greek olives, pasta, and wines that the world can be induced to buy.

Greece’s ace in the hole may be its NATO membership. But looking at what Greece can provide the other NATO members in that department does not yield much. So let me suggest something unexamined. It seems to me that Greece can play its ace by threatening to resign NATO and invite Vladimir Vladimirovich (that’s Russian for Putin Jr) to establish a very large naval base in the Mediterranean, unencumbered by a Bosporous/Dardanelles controlled by another NATO member and former invader of Mother Russia. Russia is also economically on its butt, but the Russians are made of sterner stuff and more used to austerity. They will allow Putin to spend what foreign reserves are required to protect their country’s honor in the underbelly of the west.

Putin will jump at the chance of extending its sphere of influence into the Mediterranean, and he will give no thought to America’s response to the matter. Why? because under Obama we have reverted to the global status we had in the 1930s when our military, and therefore our diplomacy was no longer a factor in the decisions of other world leaders – especially bad actors like Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo – leading up to WW2. Today our military and defense developments are contracting precipitously (more here), and we are a nation again tired of wars blamed for every imaginable ill we suffer. So as we once more retract our ability to project power, America and its interests are again no longer a relevant factor in the geo-strategic decisions made outside our borders that will change our fortunes and the world.

Having a weak and incompetent national leader with demonstrated credentials has consequences, and one of them may be the rise of America’s own version of Syriza promising a glory road ahead if only we ignore our debts and eliminate income inequality through massive increases in the tribute our wealth producers must pay on their assets and earnings. This, we are told, would not be done in an attempt to return to a sound economy. No, it must be done to achieve social justice across the land which is reward enough. You don’t have to listen too carefully to hear the clarion calls for us to collectively march down that road.

[31jan15 update] A little crowing is in order. RR again beat Stratfor in prognosticating Greece playing its Russia card. They'll get the whole thing right soon, because Russia doesn't need a better deal on olives and olive oil. More here.

26 January 2015

[Economic development season is rolling around again in Nevada County. What directions should it take and how do we do it in this small mountain county off the beaten path? Our ERC will kick things off this year with a confab on the topic this Thursday in the GV vets hall. They do welcome ideas, so sally forth! - gjr]

25 January 2015

Our universe is a very uneven and bumpy place. In our corner when we seek to impose ‘equality’, ‘balance’, and avoid ‘discrimination’, we have to take care how we go about smoothing things out, lest we also smooth out what is left of our humanity.

Private sector union membership continues its decline. When workers are given a choice, they choose not ‘to organize’ and threaten the future of their jobs with mandates for artificially high wages. Overall union membership fell from 11.3 to 11.1%. Already low, in 2014 private sector union membership dropped from 6.7 to 6.6%. The dismal story of government employees, in jobs where performance at best is optional, is that union membership actually increased from 35.3 to 35.7%. These are the gravy train workers who make up half of America’s unionized labor and must organize to threaten shutdown of critical agencies and departments if their demands for wages and impossible benefits contracts are not honored. Their unions allow no other basis upon which to determine their compensation packages.

The EU has discovered quantitative easing. QE the new alternative to national austerity programs to rein in government spending, programs that have not sat all that well with populations grown extremely dependent on the government tit. So the ECB (European Central Bank) will start printing new euros with which it will buy €60B worth of sovereign member nation’s debt each month. This essentially becomes a supply of almost free money to the several nation states. The failure of Europe’s austerity programs arises from their having been managed so as to shrink the wealth creating private sectors while growing (you guessed it) the wealth consuming public sectors.

Holman Jenkins Jr in the 24jan15 WSJ observes that “Nobody asks: How can we make our societies ones in which people find opportunity? They worry about the distribution of income but not the absence of income-creating opportunities for individuals.”

In America we have come to ape the socialist Europeans in many ways, including the imposition of ever higher job destroying minimum wages. (Yes, even liberal economists now agree that ever higher minimum wages destroy jobs, the kind which are most needed by the young and unskilled to begin their climb up the economic ladder. The ‘whether’ part of that debate is over; now we are dickering about the ‘how much’ part of the damage that minimum wages cause. Consider that in the EU unemployment among the younger workers exceeds 22%.) Our butt stupid administration – what would you expect with Valerie Jarrett on Obama’s shoulder doing the man’s frontal lobe processing? – insists that minimum wage jobs be compensated at a rate to allow the worker to support a family of four. Most people are aghast at such a premise, but enough are either blithely ignorant or terminally stupid about the implications of such a policy as to keep Team Obama taking comfort from the polls and successfully trolling for their votes.

The demonstrated result of all this is economic stagnation as demonstrated in Europe and Japan. Jenkins summarizes it nicely – “The essence of Europe’s malaise has long been a politics tilted heavily toward protecting those who have jobs from those who want them, where the biggest losers are the young and unskilled, and where stagnation is the general fate.” As again confirmed by our socialist President Obama with his target policy of taxing private 529 education savings accounts -

If you have reached the ability to save, you are a class enemy of the people because only government should be the guarantor of your future.

Clarity on the Keystone XL pipeline. A reader sent me these explanatory graphics from Bloomberg which should be understood by all who engage in debating its construction. (Unfortunately the graphics designer has yet to understand the proper use of the color palette. There is a reason we went from black to whiteboards which still eludes.) The second graphic puts the North American distribution of Canadian oil into a global context, the impact of which will trump any Keystone XL decision we wind up taking.

Judi Caler of the NCTP asked me to let RR readers know about this 28jan15 event at the NC fairgrounds. Come and meet the local crowd of the kind of Americans that scares the crap out of the Dept of Homeland Security. According to Team Obama, these are the real terrorists about whom the country should be on guard. And this is why this administration claims that we cannot just call out Islamic terrorists - no, no, no! - because there exist all these other kinds of terrorists. Scary stuff.

24 January 2015

To jog the understanding is a greater feat, than to jog the memory: for it takes more to make a man think, than to make him remember. ... Gracian #68

George Rebane

When RR launched back in 2007 its purpose was to capture my and my readers’ views on humanity’s efforts to concurrently prepare for or studiously ignore the advent of an epochal milestone in this planet’s ‘Story of Man’. The topic matter and opinions recorded in these pages cover everything from geo-politics, culture, education, economics, history, science, and of course, the Singularity, in the advent of which we now find ourselves. Readers recall that when we do realize that the Singularity has happened – I don’t believe we can predict that hour – all of our prepared plans and hopes will become moot. A new age will start on this blue, brown, and white ball.

Reading postings from some years back, I knew then that my views within most of the listed areas were charitably ‘on the fringes’ of what passed for common wisdom in our media. I was prepared for that since being on the fringes has been a common thread of my life. So I took the obligatory slings and arrows from more mainstream folks as a matter of course. But over the last few years things have begun changing as also noted by my correspondents. My outlandish notions of yesteryear are being discovered and embraced by more and more observers of the human condition. What was a fringe notion on, say, items like unfunded liabilities and its impact on public policy are now repeated as alarums so common as to be in danger of again being ignored because of their repetitions. Or even more significantly, the undeflected growth of systemic unemployment due to accelerating technology and declining education in these pre-Singularity years.

Today one can point to such ideas starting to penetrate even the denser thickets of the Left (while the densest continue to be blissfully immune). I was reminded of this most recently during the critiques of President Obama’s SOU speech. As Exhibit A I offer the 22jan15 commentary – ‘Obama’s American Sniper’ - of Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial director Daniel Henninger. This respected award-winning journalist and commentator is read internationally as an established voice of America’s Right. The referenced column on the recent SOU speech makes arguments about Obama (as a chronic liar) and America’s geo-politics that could have been drawn straight from my ‘fringe’ commentaries of yesteryear, and now few would find them surprising in the pages of one of the world’s pinnacle (and yes, profitable) publications covering business, politics, and international affairs.

Of course I am heartened to see these ideas begin to leak into the mainstream. And it matters not if the recently arrived make claims to have always been here. The point is that such a migration of ideas spells hope that we may yet reverse course, and, as a society, struggle against all odds back to the tipping point. My hope is that humans will meet the Singularity as a sane species worthy to participate in a trans-human future, instead of having become yet another dying species witnessing the dawn of post-humanity. Such are my musings as I ponder the future of RR, and the efforts required to stay the course. Thoughts?

21 January 2015

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 January 2015.]

Last night President Obama gave a well-delivered yet futile State of the Union speech. It contained a list of shibboleths of the kind that the Democrats have long pilloried congressional Republicans during the last six years. All of the president’s new “middle class economics” proposals targeted the tastes of true progressives and their low-information constituencies. None have a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining traction in a Republican congress, especially since the President confirmed that last November’s historic election results have yet to reach the White House.

The main initiative that the president floated was another massive tax increase for his favorite populist target – America’s “rich” who are seen luxuriating in their filthy lucre ignominiously grabbed from the pockets of the poor and the middle class. They must now be made to give a good portion of it back, and the federal government is just the agent to decide who pays and who gets how much of it.

19 January 2015

[OK, it's that time of the year again for the major entertainment event of winter (and here you thought it was SuperBowl) when President Obama tells us again how the country's ills will be cured by taxing the rich and redistributing to the poor, er, middle class. Tomorrow night's the night, brace yourself with an abundant serving of your favorite adult beverage. And not to worry if you miss it; we are told that the half-life of a State of the Union speech is about five minutes.]

18 January 2015

What price glory? I’ve watched presidential press secretaries for decades pitch with a serious face the world according to their boss. But something that Josh Earnest, the current Chief Lackey to our twice elected Liar-in-Chief, said rang a special bell. The whole country is talking about Obama’s prevarication about the ISLAMIST jihad and ISLAMISTS’ use of terrorism. Our president draws the country’s ire on himself by refusing to connect Islam in any shape or form to the multi-decadal Islamist attack on the west. He instead chooses to look at these acts, and now territorial offensives, as isolated criminal attacks by people who have misunderstood and perverted the religion of peace as a cover.

But let’s again be charitable and attribute Obama’s understanding of world events to an epochal, unique, and rare attack of cranial densititis. Can we in all honesty say that such a deficit has afflicted his entire White House staff, or is there some ass kissing and boot licking going on to keep those staff positions on your resume? Josh Earnest presents himself as a reasonable and well-spoken man. Yet when he claimed yesterday that attributing the most recent spate of raghead attacks to radical Islam is “in error” because we don’t know their source since “there are many kinds of terrorists in the world”, he did go beyond the pale. How can that man say such things day after day and then look at himself in the mirror? It truly boggles the mind; who does he think will hire him after his gig at the White House ends? (Oh, I know I know, there are all kinds of sleazebag outfits out there that need values-free mouthpieces. But who wants to work for them pushing the same crap to the public as a career move?)

Is it or isn’t it a war between civilizations? Well, that discussion is now in the public forum. Many public figures and even heads of state have come out recently declaring that it really is a war. And yet many others, led by Obama and including UK’s David Cameron, continue to hold back. Cameron not so much since he takes every opportunity to include ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamist’ into statements about the jihadist attacks in Europe and the territorial wars in the Mideast and Africa. But he still doesn’t yet “want to characterize it as a war.” Now if we take the Obama/Cameron progressivist argument to one of its logical conclusions, then the military activities we have had in the Mideast since 2003 have also not been war or, if you will, wars. Why? because the military actions we have engaged in since then have involved fighting that is just as intense, involving more casualties than we suffered, with participants who are much more organized (enough to conquer, hold, and administer territories) and adhere to a coherent objective, and join in combat that now ranges over multiple continents. And this time we don’t call it a war? But the cherry on the cake is that everyone on the other side, including the millions upon millions of so-called moderate Muslims, fervently believe Islam is engaged in a holy war with the infidel west. Anyone think that there exists a progressive who will say, ‘Oh shit, well when you look at it that way, I guess we are at war.’ Don’t hold your breath.

17 January 2015

Traveling with some friends, we just returned from a visit to Lakeview – at 4,798 feet ‘The Tallest Town in Oregon’. Lakeview sits at the north end of Goose Lake, a huge drainage basin shared by California and Oregon. It also advertises itself as the ‘Gateway to the Oregon Outback’ which is the sparsely populated high desert of the state’s eastern region. The town of about 2,200 has definitely seen better days. And from talking to the locals, the worst is yet to come. What happened?

During our stay we had a chance to talk to owners of three businesses. Each had lived there for at least twenty years, and they told us a story of what happens when a town decides to buy into an imported glory road. Historically Lakeview grew as the seat of Lake County and the commercial center for ranching and timber enterprises in southern Oregon, in later years adding a dollop of tourism that took advantage of the nearby mountains for camping, skiing, and some awesome hang gliding.

Then in the 1990s came some new folks with slick talk of smart growth, things natural, and sustainability. They pitched the community on getting some OPM (other people’s money) to develop natural sources of wind, solar, and geothermal energy. In the future, business and living would be controlled as they are in the big cities. New zoning laws were passed, and strict business ordinances put in place. With the help of a couple of big name foundations and government grants things were going to get organized – things were going to become progressive as reflected in the town’s new ‘mission statement’

The mission of the Town of Lakeview is to provide citizens with a safe, family-oriented community while promoting sustainable development of our human, economic and natural resources. We progressively seek a positive future while honoring our heritage.

Well, things didn’t work out as the central planners had it figured. The projects were delayed, the monies were late, some stuff had been overlooked, and when it came right down to it, people had other ideas which they now had a hard time implementing because of all the new rules and ordnances and codes and … . Since they could no longer implement their own plans – i.e. continue the free and self-reliant lifestyle that drew and kept them there – people started leaving Lakeview. Today the town is eerily empty with boarded up stores and empty commercial buildings, as its population has declined for the last twenty years.

There is a lot more to the story of Lakeview as another place that has suffered from progressive blight, and we’ll add to this piece as relevant data warrants. But what I want to point out with this report is that such blight has quietly spread pretty much nationwide, most certainly since 2009 when we started getting all those new rules and recovery programs for the Great Recession. It is charitably clear that no one from Washington has looked at how rural counties have taken the brunt of the ‘new thinking’ that is being imposed bit by piece on our less populated regions. In Lakeview people know about Agenda21 (they told us so) because they are living it every day. The real plan for Lakeview is for it to revert to its ‘natural state’ before people arrived.

As reported here for some years, California’s rural counties are destined for the same future as Lake County. We see it right here in Nevada County which has a lot more to offer residents than Lake County, Oregon. Of course, California imposes on us its own unique and widely infamous brand of insanity to impede growth, economic development, public use of public and private lands, and on and on. Our own imported progressives are very active in creating and sustaining an environment in these foothills which stifles any vestige of human activity that is not according to the outlined objectives of Agenda21.

Such strategy notwithstanding, we in Nevada County divert ourselves periodically with workshops and meetings that address the holy grail of economic growth. And we invite speakers from faraway places to tell us how they were able or are still trying to promote such growth. What we seem to miss is that these hoped for experts come from places that look nothing like our county and community. Perhaps we should hold more useful gatherings and hear the experiences of people from places like Lake County. I bet that each of them have a woulda/coulda/shoulda tale to tell that would really resonate with what we have been going through, and maybe even shine a light on some yet-to-be-discovered dark corners where there be tigers waiting for us.

13 January 2015

Two Nevada County progressives have claimed to receive different receptions from local folks and the established mover and shaker networks. In yesterday’s (12jan15) Union we had a long lament by Jim Firth, a leader of the Democrat Party hereabouts. Upon arriving, Mr Firth quickly jumped into local politics and came away a bit bloodied, having been rejected to seats on local commissions and received a drubbing from the voters in two elections. He puts the blame squarely on the shortsightedness of the county’s establishment, and an undeserved pummeling in the local blogosphere.

On the obverse side we see Ms Heidi Hall who has her eyes on Nevada County as a proper stepping stool for higher public office. Readers may recall that Ms Hall already attempted to unseat Congressman Doug LaMalfa last November. The lady has an impressive array of impeccable progressive credentials, and now a correspondent advises me that she will be able to promote her brand of politics through two significant Nevada County trumpets – KVMR and The Union for which she will do a weekly radio commentary and write a bi-weekly column. Quite a different reception from that received by fellow Democrat Jim Firth. (Full disclosure - I am a former Union columnist and do a regular commentary on KVMR.)

Both Firth and Hall are devotees of extensive government care, central planning, and a more economically homogeneous society. So it is a puzzlement why two people with such similar ideologies have fared so differently. But don’t get me wrong, the jury is still out. Nevada County remains a distinctly right-of-center county with an unusually large population of retireds. Perhaps Ms Hall has moderated her tilt to port to account for that. Her first Union column appeared today wherein she encouraged people to get informed and engage in politics. Within this seemingly neutral counsel was wrapped her enthusiasm and support for Betty Yee who was elected California Controller last fall. In there she pointed out Yee’s rejection of “corporate money” without even a whisper of the extensive union funding her campaign enjoyed. Fair enough – I, for one, do not expect nor want ideologues to attempt some claimed ‘balance’ in their advocacies and apologetics.

In sum, I hope Jim Firth keeps up the good fight to get into some public office of note, and in that pursuit continues to leave a trail of prescriptive opinion pieces in the paper and on blogs that extol the joys of expanding collectivism in our county. And I welcome Heidi Hall’s “joining the local punditry”, but do hope that Ms Hall’s future columns and commentaries will depart from her, perhaps understandable, cautious inaugural pabulum to give us all something substantial to chew on.

11 January 2015

The pen is mightier than the sword only to the extent that it can evoke more powerful swords.

As millions of others on this planet, my thoughts have turned to Islam and its role in the ongoing global reign of terror exemplified again by the slaughter in Paris last week. These reflections have been piqued by the diversity of reporting and commentary on these attacks, and how many in the news, commentary, and government industries have trouble calling a spade a spade. To be accurate, there are a precious few outlets and commentators that dare connect Islam to these events, but most speak only of disconnected and broadbrush notions like ‘criminality’ and ‘terror’ which blossom forth spontaneously out of the void.

This morning listening to NPR I heard an extended interview with Irshad Manji the author of The Trouble with Islam (2004). She taught us that in addition to fundamental and moderate Muslims, there now exists a group identified as “reformed Muslims”. She never said from what these folks had managed to reform themselves, but the tenets of this newest version of Islam seems to have been transplanted from the reformed versions of Christianity and Judaism which have succumbed to the siren call of secular humanism, but have yet to complete their wholesale renunciation of their former religions.

Ms Manji waxed eloquently about the proper understanding of the Quran which really teaches non-violence, condemns terror, encourages self-discovery of beliefs, promotes free expression, and elevates women in society. These finer points of progressive Islam have been missed over the centuries, and continue to be misunderstood. She also seems happy to have discovered that Muslims marrying outside their faith tends to dilute the stricter teachings of the prophet, and will over time bring Islam into a state of rapprochement in countries where such intermingling of cultures is fostered and tolerated. But what the poor woman apparently misses completely is that that is the raison d’etre for Islamist jihad – Islam per se cannot survive in multi-cultural amalgams such as exist in liberal western countries.

This report wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that her astounding revelations about Islam have brought forth an uncountable number of the obligatory death threats from fellow believers who for centuries have held quite different views about free expression.

09 January 2015

[It seems that I just blink, and the last sandbox is overflowing. Again apologies for the delay in opening a new one. The comment stream of 'Scattershots - 4jan15' was beginning to bear too many extra-curricular burdens.]

07 January 2015

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 7 January 2015.]

The recent police killings of two black men, and the revenge murders of two NYC police officers highlight legitimate fears that have now been brought to a fever pitch by grandstanding politicians and activist demagogues. In New York Mayor De Blasio ran on the alleged evils and racial bias of the city’s police department. Never mind that the data from policies like ‘broken windows’ and ‘stop & frisk’ did not support any of the popular contentions he used to stir up the city’s black population.

After the Staten Island death of Eric Garner his honor excoriated his police to the extent of inviting demonstrations in which police were physically attacked to shouts of ‘What do we want? Dead cops!’ This invitation reinforced the image of police targeting black men and ultimately resulted in the assassinations of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by Ismaaiyl Brinsley after posting “They Take 1 Of Ours...... Let’s Take 2 of Theirs, #ShootThePolice.” The result is a standown of policing in the city with ongoing public shows of disrespect by the police to their mayor. (more here)

When we step back and take a cooler and more reasoned look at the numbers that record what has actually happened in fatal encounters between police and civilians, two different pictures emerge. Each picture is used to support arguments of why blacks fear the police, and why the police fear blacks. And make no mistake, reasonable or unreasonable, the fear is real on both sides.

04 January 2015

Legalization of marijuana (MJ). Now that California begins its statewide march toward legalizing MJ, it is noteworthy to look at the path such initiatives have forged for our forebears Washington and Colorado. In both states the ‘leakage’ of medical MJ (MMJ) into recreational MJ (RMJ) markets is now rampant. Both states’ taxes on RMJ are so high that they have given rise to lively and growing RMJ black markets, and of course, the corresponding growth of the population of illegitimate MMJ consumers, since MMJ is taxed at much lower rates. In many ways this is a blessing for the MJ law enforcement industry since such over-taxed legalization has not eliminated the lawless side of MJ production and distribution.

We in California should pay close attention to these happenings as we assemble coalitions and committees to study and propose our own state’s new laws and local codes for MJ. The main contenders will again be the inevitable fact that most MMJ buyers will be RMJ users, and that the neighborhood nuisance factor will be prominent in considering where and how MJ can be produced. We should do a better job than so far demonstrated (as predicted) in Washington and Colorado (and Oregon?).

The Muslim colonization of Europe. Those most liberal and progressive Swedes are demonstrating the approach of their breakpoint to the established and growing Muslim enclaves in the country. As the informed reader knows, such Muslim enclaves are entrenched today in all well-to-do northern European countries, enclaves where Sharia law is openly and blatantly practiced, where indigenous constabularies dare not go, and in which the established lamestream media dare not report on the actual medieval practices and goings-on on formerly Christian, now secular humanist, soil. (See also 'Islamophobia 2.0')

This colonization and the atrocities of Islam are abetted by our progressive ranks in leadership positions and the gruberized voters filled with politically correct pabulum who continue returning them to those positions. (Our own foothills run rampant with these types.) None of these people in the west hold the so-called moderate Muslims to account as they quietly watch the global campaign of murder. Now one of their own, President al-Sisi of Egypt and leader of the largest Arab nation in the world, in a major speech has accused the global Islamic population of encouraging their own ragheads to spread the carnage in the middle east and elsewhere (more here and here, and H/T to reader). He joins with the many other leaders of Islam (and precious few westerners) in attesting that we are not in a worldwide ‘war on terror’, but in a resumption of the war between Islam and the west that is promoted and prosecuted by the now multifarious and growing number of radical Islamic factions. Al-Sisi and other truly moderate (anti-radical) Muslims see no good end for Islam from this escalating conflict, and are trying to convince their own populations to oppose their indigenous radicals. Only the double dummies of the west are blind to this comprehensive and global reality.

01 January 2015

[Happy 2015 to one and all, may this year's discussions and debates be equally energetic and stimulating as the jousting that took place in 2014. I promise to do my part by trying to serve up as many ideological and current events hot buttons as possible. For this sandbox I throw out 'The New Wave of Graphic Novels' which are hitting the (dare I use word) 'literary scene'. Would enjoy hearing some reader opinions - especially from RL Crabb - on where this is taking us.]